Starbucks barista reveals why working there can be miserable
Now, one barista has come forward to share what it's like working for for the coffee giant.
"I have seen many co-workers quit on short notice because they couldn't earn enough to make ends meet or their work schedule was too erratic to plan important things like child care," Caitlin O'Reilly-Green, who has worked as a barista for the last 18 months, writes in Time.
"Though I faced some of the same issues, the hardest part of the job for me was without a doubt the so-called 'skeleton-shifts' - severely understaffed shifts that left me stressed, exhausted, and, as a result, sick."
She claims that earlier this year she was forced to run the entire store for four straight days when a co-worker called in sick.
"The work was so grueling that I eventually developed a muscle spasm in my back and was forced to stop working for three months in order to recover from my injury," she writes.
She discussed "clopen" shifts, where workers have to close the store late at night only to return early the following morning to open it back up.
Starbucks has vowed to improve working conditions, but things have been slow to change, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.
Store managers are partly to blame. They are given tight labor budgets and incentivized to understaff stores, which makes it difficult to staff workers on regular schedules, according to the Times report.